Excel: Conditionally Highlight a Whole Row

Sometimes I come across something that I know I’ll want to remember and I have to store it somewhere… it’s often here.

To conditionally highlight a whole row based off one cell value, consider the following:

You have a table of data and there’s a column you want to toggle the highlight off to. That column is B and the value is ERROR versus something that’s not-ERROR.

Select the whole sheet.

Go to Conditional Formatting, select Manage Rules, and add a new Rule in the dialog box that shows up.

Select “Use a formula to determine which cells to format”

Enter the following to highlight rows, starting with 1 and where the current Row’s column B is equal to ERROR:

=$B1="ERROR"

Close the dialog boxes until you’re back in the sheet.

FWIW, if you want it based off a numeric value, you can do =$B1>20. If you want start with a lower Row, change the 1 to a higher value.


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